Recently there was a great article at Wired on whether or not “atoms are the new bits”. I’ve pondered this from a small business standpoint and how these new technologies are lowering barriers to entry. Along those same lines, I found myself needing a fuse for my car this week. Upon visiting the auto parts store, I found that despite needing only a fuse I was going to have to buy between 10 and 50 fuses.
The obvious reason for this situation is that a brick and mortar store could presumable never recoup sufficient profit margins from selling a single fuse given the packaging, shipping, and other overhead involved in distributing a physical product.his reality was reinforced by the following twitter exchange on the subject:
It seems that Apple was able to disrupt the bundled songs on a CD model because they didn’t have the physical overhead and instead were able to distribute single songs at virtually no cost aside from licensing. Likewise, craigslist could disrupt classified ads since they didn’t have the substantial costs of producing and distributing a physical paper. Both of these cases illustrate the ability of digital products to disrupt physical counterparts. I’m hopeful that with advances in technology, physical products can disrupt legacy physical products – when can I 3-D print my own fuse? I’m looking forward to seeing what new advances this disruption will bring about.
